Paper, Glue, and Healing

It's summertime, and besides my normal activities of gardening and pool-lounging, I have revisited my artsy collage journal that I started last summer. This journal began one day when the girls and I decided to do some crafting together. They were making some collage pictures for their friends, and I started cutting out words and phrases that I liked for myself. I found it relaxing and fun, and it woke up my creativity a bit, so I went with it. It didn't take long, and I found myself at the kitchen table with the girls many times over last summer, cutting up magazines while listening to music, gluing words and phrases into my small journal. I had been working through my grief over losing my brother, my body had changed from being sick, and I was still adjusting to the many changes in my life. I had a lot of confusion, changing relationships, and a lot of questions about things I had never questioned before. Everything was just one big mess of confusion, and cutting up little pieces of paper and gluing it onto another just seemed to make it all come together in a nice messy, organized way.

I guess I didn't realize how much the journaling was helping me cope until I looked through the pages later to see how my perspective about myself had changed from page to page. The best way I can show this is by sharing some of the pages with you. It was therapeutic in a way, to see how I could feel "invisible" and "frustrated" on one corner of a page, while on the adjacent page, I was "tough" and "optimistic". That page is titled "I Am", which reflects all the characteristics I felt at that time. I was all of those things at once, and somehow it was perfectly fine to be that way. I was opening myself up and looking at my insides, and realizing I may have felt out of balance, but it was just my feelings that were out of balance, and life is just that way sometimes. But it wasn't just a balance issue, it was also remembering to give myself credit for the good things I was feeling about myself too. While I'm not always that great with self-discovery, my little journal has been an effective tool to help me work out situations that I don't always understand at first.


I've been working on a lot of poetry lately, and working on my journal has been very helpful in getting in touch with emotions, which is of huge importance to poetry. While I haven't experienced every emotion, I research a lot of poetry in an effort to understand different feelings. I wanted to know the difference between the mind and the heart where love is concerned, which led to making a journal page about the subject. I'm not sure I understand it much better, but I now know that love from the heart is the best kind of love, takes the most amount of courage, and is worth the risk. Head love is probably pretty temporary and based on fleshly things and may not last. Just my "thoughts".

Then there are my "silly" pages, which reflect my sense of humor and my need to just be fun.
I left out a few pages. Those are just for me. But I would encourage you to try collage journaling if you like to journal, but get tired of writing.  It is fun, relaxing, and revealing, as it turns out. I have learned a lot about myself, and have taught my family things about me that they didn't know. Like, mom can be ridiculous and deep, all on the same page.